Diana Birchall (email: Birchalls@aol.com)
is a story analyst at Warner Bros. She is the author of Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma
and Mrs. Elton in America (Sourcebooks),
In Defense of Mrs. Elton
(JASNA), and Onoto Watanna, a scholarly biography of her grandmother, the first Asian American
novelist (University of Illinois Press).

The
past ten years have seen an explosion of sequels, continuations, and alternate
universe fantasies based on Jane Austen’s novels, in which
there is no end to liberties taken: her characters turn up in
locations around the globe, in centuries past and future, and as
vampires, zombies, and Americans. My purpose is to examine an
unexpected result of this phenomenon: that a new understanding
of Austen’s works can be gained by the unorthodox method of
writing pastiche.

This discovery came to me through none other than the surprising channel of Mrs. Elton,
who, as you know, always liked to enlighten people about how things
should be done. It began when I wrote a little book called In
Defense of Mrs. Elton. To my surprise, examining the novel Emma
with such a purpose in mind was most productive because it resulted
in giving me new insights into Jane Austen’s writing, and
especially her subtle ways of framing a character. In Mrs.
Elton’s case, “framing” has a double meaning
because Jane Austen is not particularly kind to her character.
I noticed in particular the layered and clever way in which Jane
Austen cunningly set about making Mrs. Elton “the daemon of the
piece” (MP 448). If you cut away Austen’s editorial presentation, it
is possible to view Mrs. Elton in quite a different light.
Austen’s treatment of Emma is tender. But analyzed apart
from this softening envelope, Emma’s behavior is the equal of
Mrs. Elton’s; you might say that she is Mrs. Elton writ large,
or that Mrs. Elton is Emma writ small.

Mrs. Elton is one of the greatest and most maliciously drawn of Austen’s comic
characters. The man with the best judgment in the book, Mr.
Knightley, shows us how to think about Mrs. Elton. We are
masterfully led by his pronouncing sentence upon her: Harriet
Smith is “‘infinitely to be preferred . . . to
such a woman as Mrs. Elton’” (331). Such a woman.
Intrigued by Mrs. Elton, I examined what we know about her, both
before her marriage and afterward. At least in my obsession, I
have refrained from following the lady to what Jane Austen called “a
juster appointment hereafter” (MP 468). In my imagination,
however, I have gone so far as to accompany her on a trip to North America,
in my novel Mrs. Elton in America.
Poor Mr. Elton gets scalped by Indians, and their son grows up to be
cabinet minister to Abraham Lincoln.

Why this fascination with one of Jane Austen’s least likeable characters? Why
not focus like any sensible person on Lizzy Bennet and Mr. Darcy, or
even on Emma herself? Mrs. Elton is an unusually strong and
vivid character. She cannot fail to be noticed. When Mr.
Elton brings her to Highbury as his bride, we find her to be a pert,
conceited, socially pushy woman whom Emma immediately dislikes for
her presumption and her manners, which, she concludes sententiously,
“had been formed in a bad school” (272).

The first time I read Emma, I must admit I was almost tone deaf to the outrageousness of Mrs.
Elton’s behavior. Time and again Emma kept on being
appalled by her. Nobody liked her. The right-thinking Mr.
Knightley and Mrs. Weston disparaged her much as Emma did. Emma
may often be wrong, but their
opinions are those of sensible adults. Jane Fairfax suffered
Mrs. Elton’s patronage, but without seeming to really like her,
and only the kindly but completely undiscriminating Miss Bates and
Mr. Woodhouse had absolutely no criticisms to make of her at all.

What is it that Mrs.
Elton does that invites such general scorn and dislike? Why
does Jane Austen hold her up to such opprobrium? When she and
Emma first meet, Mrs. Elton proposes that they “‘have
many sweet little concerts together’” and unite to
“‘establish a musical club’” (277).
Emma is outraged. Mrs. Elton keeps talking, as if nervously,
trying to impress Emma with her sister’s big house, Maple
Grove, but Emma just keeps getting more and more disgusted at
everything she says. She keeps putting her foot in it:
the woman can’t say anything right. Yet it didn’t
seem to me that poor Mrs. Elton was doing anything so terribly
wrong—nothing so shocking according to my
idea of manners. Emma’s bad opinion of the new arrival
might be one of Emma’s own misjudgments, but the narrator
strongly indicates that Emma’s opinions of Mrs. Elton are in
fact right, “‘exactly so,’” in Mr. Elton’s phrase.

Emma was not required, by any subsequent discovery, to retract her ill opinion of
Mrs. Elton. Her observation had been pretty correct. Such
as Mrs. Elton appeared to her on this second interview, such she
appeared whenever they met again,—self-important, presuming,
familiar, ignorant, and ill-bred. (281)

That is Jane Austen telling us what she means for us to think. Yet
Emma is conceited and presumptuous herself. When she and Mr.
Elton are talking about Harriet’s illness, “‘[N]ot
even I can charm away a sore throat,’” she says (114).
Or there’s her sweeping assumption that she herself made the
match between the Westons. Or there’s her early snobbish
disdain of Mr. Elton: when he proposes, she thinks of him as
having “the arrogance to raise his eyes to her” (135).

Emma is as snobbish and arrogant as Mrs. Elton, yet Jane Austen approves of Emma, makes
her a heroine who learns and grows, while Mrs. Elton is condemned to
stay just the same at the end of the book as at the beginning,
obnoxious and reviled. To emphasize this unchanged and
unchanging Mrs. Elton, she is given the very final speech of the
entire book, a characteristically catty remark about Emma’s
wedding (“‘Very little white satin, very few lace veils;
a most pitiful business!’” [484]). Both Emma and
Mrs. Elton do some kind acts—that is, Mrs. Elton does some
things that might be seen as kindnesses if Jane Austen allowed us to
look at them that way. Yet Emma is shown, quite simply, as
having a heart, while Mrs. Elton is not credited with such an organ.
Margaret Kirkham in Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction
says that Emma has “a strong power of calling forth warm
affection,” quoting John Henry Newman as saying, “I feel
kind to her whenever I think of her” (123). That quality, Mrs. Elton has not.

In presenting Mrs. Elton in the way she does, Jane Austen is deliberately being a
“partial, prejudiced . . . Historian” (MW 138).
Mrs. Elton’s misdeeds are social crimes, not actual
ones, and I would argue that she does far less damage than Emma.
Calling Miss Fairfax “Jane,” urging her to look for a
job, and always fishing for compliments are not in the same league as
trying to manipulate people’s lives, as Emma does. But
Jane Austen paints Mrs. Elton darkly so that Emma might appear
light. She uses the unkind word “hardened” about
her, showing her as a bad influence even on her own husband:
“She did not think he was quite so hardened as his wife, though
growing very like her” (328). Mr. Elton, you see, does
not stay the same, as Mrs. Elton does: He grows worse.
Yet Emma is certainly a very bad influence on at least one other person: Harriet.
It’s not just that Emma helps Harriet prepare for the evening
of her life by collecting foolish riddles, but she also breaks up her
unexceptionable marriage proposal and fills her head with romantic,
unjustified fancies about men who are not actually in love with her
at all. Emma is without a doubt a harmful influence, but these
acts are seen only as youthful “womanly follies” (463),
which she grows out of.

Or does she?
Even after her engagement Emma says about herself, “‘I
always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any
other’” (474). This seems a joking, casual
statement, but it’s quite a self-indictment. A woman who
never puts up with any but the best treatment is a formidable
figure. Emma is no saint, but in my view, Mrs. Elton is no
sinner. So what has she done to deserve the negative authorial
treatment she receives? And what does it mean that I personally feel
this alarming sense of identification with her? Enough to
sympathize, defend her, and study her?

The reason for this
may hark back to my own hometown, New York City, from where I was
transplanted. That was where I first read Emma
and responded to Mrs. Elton as somebody having the quintessential New
York characteristics of vigor, brashness, adventurousness,
take-charge action. In fact, I see her almost as a spiritual
New Yorker, a sort of Regency Bella Abzug, if you will. Mrs.
Elton is a transplant. “‘Whenever you are
transplanted, like me, Miss Woodhouse, you will understand how very
delightful it is to meet with any thing at all like what one has left
behind’” (273). She has a transplant’s
personality, that of somebody who is self-made, perhaps of immigrant
background, with manners not quite assimilated, a stranger in a
strange land. Of course Mrs. Elton comes from Bristol.

Miss Hawkins was the youngest of the two daughters of a Bristol—merchant, of course,
he must be called; but, as the whole of the profits of his mercantile
life appeared so very moderate, it was not unfair to guess the
dignity of his line of trade had been very moderate also. Part
of every winter she had been used to spend in Bath; but Bristol was
her home, the very heart of Bristol. (183)

Rowbotham, (left) View from the Top of Lodge Street; (above)View from the Stone Bridge, Head of the Quay (both 1826).
Courtesy of Bristol City Museum.

Emma, in considering Mrs. Elton’s origins, does so in an arrogant, socially superior
way; we find this sneering tone in all her thoughts about Mrs.
Elton. Why does she so scorn her origins? It’s a
small but important detail, for we form judgments of characters based
on where they live. What did it mean to Austen’s
contemporary readers to know that Mrs. Elton is from Bristol?
Bristol in Jane Austen’s day was a major port of the slave
trade; and Emma was written only a few years after the abolition. Jane Austen
was pro-abolition. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh tells
us in his Memoir of Jane Austen
that she admired the abolition writer Thomas Clarkson (107), and a
letter exists written by her brother Francis Austen when he visited
the island of St. Helena in 1808 and observed slavery there. It
is quoted in Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers,
by J. H. and E. C. Hubback: “slavery however it
is modified is still slavery, and it is much to be regretted that any
trace of it should be found to exist in countries dependent on
England or colonized by her subjects” (192). Jane was
living in this brother’s household in Southampton at about this
time. She also visited Bristol herself, and liked it: “It
will be two years tomorrow since we left Bath for Clifton [Bristol],
with what happy feelings of Escape!” she wrote in that same
year (1 July 1808).

Jane Austen had a technique of forwarding her opinions covertly. Gabrielle White,
in Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition: A Fling at the Slave Trade,
holds that Austen was indeed making some subtle “flings at the
slave trade” in Emma (1).
Mrs. Elton’s father left her a fortune of £10,000 and
presumably her sister Selina the same. Emma’s sneering
view of this sum calls it “so very moderate,” but it was
a fair sum in those days; Captain Wentworth is called “rich”
(P 61) for having made not much more. Still, Mrs. Elton’s
merchant father did not make enough to suspect him of profiting from
the slave trade. Her uncle, whom Emma calls “the drudge
of some attorney” (183) though without knowing anything about
him, evidently isn’t rich. Mrs. Elton was in fact a
tradesman’s daughter, living with, perhaps keeping house for,
her lawyer uncle. Lawyers do not rank high socially in Austen.
Bingley’s sisters look down on the Gardiners, John Knightley is
anything but “in society,” and everyone looks down on the
lawyer John Shepherd in Persuasion.
But coming from a lawyer’s household, Mrs. Elton has acquired a
certain type of social facility: she knows people, women who
keep lodgings; she makes contacts; she’s a networker.

I think we can clear Mrs. Elton of association with slavery. But Jane Austen has
subtly put it in our minds that there may be a taint of slave trade
association in her past, as there is of trade itself in her
background. And Mrs. Elton seems to show defensive
consciousness of this stigma. In the famous passage in Emma
which refers to the slave trade, Jane Fairfax says, “‘There
are places in town, offices, where inquiry would soon produce
something—Offices for the sale—not quite of human
flesh—but of human intellect.’” Mrs. Elton
responds, “‘Oh! my dear, human flesh! You quite
shock me; if you mean a fling at the slave-trade, I assure you Mr.
Suckling was always rather a friend to the abolition’”
(300).

Margaret Kirkham says, “The woman whose fortune has put her in a position to
play the part of a patroness is a Bristolian. No wonder she is
sensitive about the slave-trade” (132). At the time
Augusta was growing up in Bristol, the slave trade was still going on
and would have been a vital subject of discussion. Kirkham
points out that “Bristol had been dissociating itself from the
slave trade.” And that is what Mrs. Elton does. No
wonder she is wild to leave Bristol, and very glad indeed to marry a
clergyman.

T. L. S. Rowbotham, View of the Floating Harbour from
Redcliffe Back Ferry (1826). Courtesy of Bristol City Museum.

Coming from Bristol, Mrs. Elton would also have been aware of many currents of the times
that utterly bypass Emma in Highbury. We may see her as
uncertain, embarrassed, and therefore defensive and strident.
She’s ashamed of her family’s roots and yet mouths
rhetoric that she, socially precarious and pretentious, is certainly
not going to follow up on. Bragging in the way people do who
are ashamed of their origins, Mrs. Elton is a more complex character
than she may seem when we see her merely as a comic villain.

Let us examine her social crimes, for she is accused of no other kind. Her main
one is assuming the role of Jane Fairfax’s patroness. This
presumption is ironically funny because Jane Fairfax doesn’t
need a patroness as she’s secretly engaged and far more of a
lady than Mrs. Elton. Presuming as she is, Mrs. Elton is
actually doing, in a clumsy way, exactly what Emma ought to do
herself. Mr. Knightley tells Emma that Jane Fairfax “‘receives
attentions from Mrs. Elton, which nobody else pays her’”
(286). But Mrs. Elton’s hurrying Jane “into a
delightful situation against her will” (343) is the kind of
thing many efficient, networking sorts of people do, perhaps to show
how capable and powerful they are but also to be kind to someone
powerless. Jane Fairfax is not aggressive, and Mrs. Elton is.
Mrs. Elton is a woman of action. Emma hardly moves out of the
shrubbery, has never seen the sea, but Mrs. Elton transplants herself
and moves into a new situation across the country, sight unseen.
Once there, she gamely tries to make the most of things—a very
modern approach. Her trying to get Jane Fairfax a situation is
officious, but at worst it is misapplied kindness, kindness that Emma
herself never pays Jane Fairfax until the day she sends her some
equally unwanted arrowroot.

Another supposed crime is Mrs. Elton’s cruelty to Harriet. When Harriet is
left without a partner at the ball, Mrs. Elton and her husband share
their glee over his snubbing her, and Mr. Knightley shows them how a
gentleman ought to behave. Mrs. Elton seems petty in her
unkindness to harmless young Harriet, but Mr. Knightley astutely
says, “‘They aimed at wounding more than Harriet. . . .
Emma, why is it that they are your enemies?’” (330).
Mrs. Elton is jealous of Emma. Her own position is not secure.
Emma has rejected her—and her own husband, her one stay, once
wanted to marry Emma. She wants to show Emma that she has
triumphed, that she now controls Mr. Elton. So yes, she’s
trying to wound the powerful, important Emma. It’s
equally understandable why she wants to wound Harriet, a very pretty
girl who is in love with her husband. It is hardly
reprehensible of Mrs. Elton to want to put an end to those feelings,
to cut off her fantasies, so there never will be any trouble in that
direction.

Mrs. Elton may pay attentions to Miss Fairfax which no one else will pay her, but it’s
never mentioned that no one pays attentions to Mrs. Elton. Only
Mr. Woodhouse has an old fashioned sense of what is right: “‘A
bride, you know, my dear, is always the first in company’”
(280). But Emma, the doyenne of Highbury society, gives her no
warm and friendly welcome, even though she is the vicar’s new
wife, with whom Emma will associate forever. How cold and how
unforeseeing it is of Emma not to be a little more gracious! To
me, her quickness to judge and her rejecting manners are some of the
most blatant and arrogant of Emma’s youthful misjudgments
though Jane Austen carefully refrains from emphasizing them.
Yes, Emma should have formed a musical society with Mrs. Elton!
Yes, she should have allowed her the happiness of showing how ice
should be used in the Highbury card parties! But Emma was too
proud and vain. Later when Mr. Knightley chastises her for
being unfeeling to Miss Bates, he reminds her that there were some
who “‘would be entirely guided by your
treatment of her’” (375). Yes, and those same
people are also led by Emma’s bad behavior to Mrs. Elton.
Gentle Mrs. Weston echoes the cutting things Emma says, rather at
variance with her kindly and social husband, who always wants to
include Mrs. Elton, much to Emma’s chagrin.

No, I cannot dislike Mrs. Elton simply because she “has manners formed in a bad
school.” That is not her fault, and I think she is doing
her best by her own lights. And how is she received? With
cold civility. For Mrs. Elton is different from anyone else in
Highbury. She has spent more time in the great world than
Emma. Emma feels threatened by the first approach of this
vigorous outside force, and her instinct is to repress and squash
her.

I think it’s interesting to consider that Mrs. Elton is the only person in any
Jane Austen novel to actually speak out in modern fashion in favor of
women’s rights. Anne Elliot, in Persuasion,
defends women in argument with Captain Harville (232), but she is not
speechifying; it is only Mrs. Elton who sees “standing up for
women” as a daringly modern antagonistic position to take.
This assertion is advanced and unexpected in a commonplace woman who
is no Mary Wollstonecraft. When Mr. Weston admits to opening
his wife’s letters, Mrs. Elton chaffingly criticizes him:
“‘No, indeed, I shall grant you nothing. I always
take the part of my own sex. I do indeed. I give you
notice—You will find me a formidable antagonist on that point.
I always stand up for women’” (306).

Unfortunately she finishes this ringing statement by effacing it with trivia:
“‘and I assure you, if you knew how Selina feels with
respect to sleeping at an inn, you would not wonder at Mrs.
Churchill’s making incredible exertions to avoid it.’”
This is deliberately satirical; Mrs. Elton’s fine protestations
of women’s rights go for nothing. Yet the fact remains
that she is the
only woman in Jane Austen to make any such statements at all.
Whether she sincerely believes in supporting women, is not the
point. It’s that she is the only one who uses this kind
of rhetoric. Where does she get it from? For Mrs. Elton
is not a woman to originate an idea of her own.

In her worldly life, Augusta Hawkins clearly was exposed to ideas. Ideas,
anti-abolitionist, and also feminist, were circulating in Bristol.
Hannah More kept her school there, and Mary Wollstonecraft lived for
a time in Bristol. The winds of change and of women’s
rights may not yet have reached the stodgy backwater Highbury, but
they have obviously penetrated into Mrs. Elton’s consciousness,
making her a more modern woman than Emma. She does not venture
to make women’s rights statements unadorned; she conceals them
in all the chat about Selina’s sheets, for she is no reformer.
She is just as likely to display false romantic feeling, with her
beribboned basket and old chestnut poetic quotations, as feminist
ideas. But the ideas are there. Janet
Todd writes, in “The Anxiety of Emma,” that “Mrs.
Elton, the maker of events, who has travelled from Bristol to Bath to
Surrey sight unseen, is a projector in her way” (21).
And, she points out, “Considering
how disliked the notion of Mary Wollstonecraft was by the 1800s, it
seems that any strident feminist rhetoric would have to be placed in
the mouths of fools or villains” (email to author).
So it’s interesting that this character, with a half-baked
mishmash of new ideas in her head, is one of Jane Austen’s
characters of whom the author most strongly disapproves. Does
this mean Jane Austen was against women’s rights? She
would have thought of them in different terms than we do, but she
carefully showed instances of the inequities of woman’s lot.
She used covert demonstrations, not firebrand rhetoric. The
fiery speeches she leaves to be casually flaunted by a mindless
character whose flaw is that she does not know how to behave.

The person who does not know how to behave, brought up in a port city of dubious
morality, is an outsider, longing to be part of civilized society.
Perhaps this dimension is one of the things many people look for in
Jane Austen: lessons in how to behave, how to live.
Through Austen’s books, we can learn how not to be a barbarian,
not to be like Mrs. Elton.

From thinking about a minor character in Emma, examining the story from her point of
view, cutting away Austen’s editorial perspective, we see that
Mrs. Elton’s behavior is open to a more sympathetic
interpretation. Thus we are enabled to see the story afresh,
and gain insight into Austen’s methods of genius. Jane
Austen purposely made Mrs. Elton obnoxious, to make Emma seem less
obnoxious. Emma is, Jane Austen said, “a character no one
but myself will much like” (Le Faye 209). How better to
make her more likeable than to give her an even more dislikeable
foil? Both characters possess unpleasantly controlling
qualities; one amends herself, the other does not. In seeing
both good growth and bad example, we can face these qualities in
ourselves if we have them, as perhaps Jane Austen felt she did
herself, in part. We can then reflect on whether we should try
to change or not: if we want to be like bad Mrs. Elton or good
Emma.

Mrs. Elton is a small study but she is a window into all of Jane Austen, and knowing
a small thing well—a little bit of ivory—can teach you
more about everything: the world in a grain of sand. Can
this approach be taken with other characters? His Cunning or Hers by
June Menzies sees Persuasion from Mrs. Clay’s point of view. Can Mansfield Park
be seen from Mrs. Norris’s side of things, Northanger Abbey from General Tilney’s,
Pride and Prejudice from Wickham’s, Sense and Sensibility
from Lucy Steele’s? Why not? We may, as Emma says, make some discoveries.

In closing, I should remind you that the meaning of the name Augusta is Divine. Jane
Austen was making a joke when she named Mrs. Elton. Remember
that Octavius took the name “Augustus” to confirm his
status as conqueror and emperor after the battles with Pompey and
Marc Antony for imperial control. Could the titanic battle
between Emma and Augusta be an ironic echo? Emma and Augusta
are young women, and their Mapp and Lucia-like struggle for
domination over Highbury might easily last until, say, 1860.
But that speculation takes us again into the world of continuation
and pastiche, a world in which I have made some discoveries, and feel
most at home.